Are You Ready for CRO 2020? 3 Experts Set the CRO Agenda for 2018 and Beyond

Email address:

Connect with Author

At MTA, Chitra creates research-based content that reflects the dynamics of the martech industry. She also lends her expertise to help plan and execute diverse campaigns, events & content strategies on the MTA platform, based on unique client needs. With over 15 years of experience in strategic marketing and communications, she has a great grasp on the way marketing professionals approach technology, their need to evolve and transform as marketers in the digital age, and the challenges therein. Specializing in Content Strategy, Digital Marketing and Loyalty Marketing; and having worked on both the marketer and the vendor side, Chitra has a knack for writing about martech in a way that simplifies this complex landscape for the end-reader, while still addressing the depth and layers of the subject. Chitra has studied media and communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and worked at blue chip companies including Timken, Tata Sky and Procter & Gamble (P&G).

Testing, experimenting, and learning is the heart of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

CRO is a journey, not a destination. As tools, behavioursand platforms evolve, brands need to continually test new combinations to maintain performance scores

CRO is more than on-site optimization: it’s a mindset that can be applied to any platform in the future

Seamless customer journeys and experiences need to be balanced with the sheer complexity of digital marketing platforms and formats today. The pressure for conversion optimization and performance marketing is not going away - it's only getting stronger, even as the complexity of engagement with customers increases. So, what should you, as a marketer, prioritize with your CRO strategy to ensure your marketing continues to perform well into 2020?

We put 5 big questions about CRO to 3 experts – here is what we learned.

1. THE CRO-UX CONUNDRUM

Undoubtedly, delivering a smooth brand experience will directly impact the performance outcomes. Does performance have to come at the cost of UX? How can marketers better balance in this increasingly complex omni-channel digital environment?

Nick So, Director of Strategy, WiderFunnel

Rather than thinking about balancing CRO and UX, you should view these as integrated activities. Creating a delightful UX is a major component of having a well-converting site.

A consistent and relevant UX across all channels motivates consumers to move deeper into your funnel.

In an omni-channel digital environment, you have to ensure your optimization activities are viewed holistically. In BJ Fogg's behavior model, a user’s ability to take the desired action with ease is half the story. You also need to ensure that your user is highly motivated to complete that action.

Carl Tsukahara, CMO, Optimizely

UX and CRO are intimately related -whether within a single channel or across multiple channels. Mobile apps, websites and other customer touchpoints should share the same goals of meeting business objectives while improving user experience, engagement, and loyalty. In situations where.

All [channels] should be measured via experimentation to uncover evidence of their standalone and combined impact on a variety of commerce objectives and metrics

UX and CRO objectives contradict, both loyalty and great transactional conversion can be optimized based on their ability to improve a larger metric such as customer lifetime value.

Alix de Sagazan, CEO, AB Tasty

With this complex environment, CRO has become essential to delivering excellent User Experience. To succeed, firms must design and build digital experiences that attract and sustain customer engagement – CRO is an established practice to deliver the best customer experiences. Organization is the key: firms may have a ‘center of excellence’ team, which manages best practices and coordinates CRO programs.

According to Forrester, 90% of firms rated their CRO programs as “valuable” or “extremely valuable” to achieve their strategic goals.

2. MAKE THE RIGHT MISTAKES – BUT AVOID THE OBVIOUS ONES

Experimentation – testing and learning – is at the heart of CRO. The flip side of that is making mistakes. But some mistakes are avoidable. Our experts highlight the most common mistakes they see marketers make today with their CRO efforts. See any you could have avoided?

Nick So, Director of Strategy, WiderFunnel

Too much focus on traffic

When it comes to your website, it's easy to just look at traffic and conversion rate. Also consider the potential, importance, and ease of optimizing for each marketing touch point.

For omni-channel experiences, a prioritization framework, like the PIE framework, helps prioritize channels for experimentation.

Doing CRO in isolation from the rest of their channels.

Investing in website-only CRO underestimates the potential of experimentation to solve business problems in today's omni-channel digital environment. Effective marketers should apply the two-pronged experimentation mindset across all digital marketing activities, where they first explore by gathering business and customer insights, and validate their hypotheses through experimentation.

It sounds simple, but high traffic doesn’t equate high conversion. Incorrect targeting will give you traffic without conversion. Marketers should focus on personalization/targeting and experimentation together.

It’s critical to segment experiments and tests by audience - delivering the right experience to improve CRO is often different for different segments of customers.

3. Are brands losing control over the CX?

As customers engage, interact and transact with brands increasingly on platforms outside of brand-owned platforms (social media, apps etc.), the marketers’ direct control over the CX is reducing. Does the fact that a customer may never even visit the brand website reduce the significance of on-site CRO?

Nick So, Director of Strategy, WiderFunnel

Smart marketers and business leaders should re-envision “CRO” as a broader activity of experimentation: of researching and validating insights across touch points, speaking to every digital marketing activity a brand engages in - not solely the website. The activities of user research, analyzing data, developing hypotheses and then actually running experiments to validate those hypotheses, can be done on every channel and platform.

What is important, irrespective of where the customer engages, is the experimentation mindset inherent in CRO – that approach makes optimization more important than ever.

Carl Tsukahara, CMO, Optimizely

Brands have to optimize and personalize the entire experience, from paid search and social to landing pages, to on-site usability, the shopping cart, encompassing everything from content to site functionality to design. The key is understanding the buyer’s journey.

Fundamentally, CRO is more important than ever, and it is evolving rapidly. Non-brand owned platforms can't be ignored but merchandisers can only focus CRO on the parts of the experience that they own - other forms of analytics can inform the overall conversion rate if the buyer’s journey is understood well.

Alix de Sagazan, CEO, AB Tasty

CRO is more than a practice; it’s now become a new way of living the omnichannel User Experience.

CRO can be everywhere, on apps, on the brand site, on social media, etc. It’s more and more important as customers are looking for a perfect experience, whatever the platform is.

4. IMMERSIVE FORMATS = IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES?

As voice, mobile and more obviously immersive formats make their presence felt in customer’s lives, how should marketers incorporate those into their CRO strategies as we go into 2020?

Nick So, Director of Strategy, WiderFunnel

Use data-driven research and empathetic understanding of the emotional state, mindset, and context of buyers as they engage at brand touch points to create delightful experiences.

Context will be crucial. No longer can the mobile site be simply a responsive clone of the desktop site. We need to understand the mobile user's context of how they are using the site, and how it's different than desktop. Are they using the mobile site in-store to research products in greater detail? Or, are they using it to re-stock home supplies while running between meetings? These are two different user contexts for one device, each requiring completely different strategies to optimize the entire user purchase journey.

Carl Tsukahara, CMO, Optimizely

Emerging technologies like voice and mobile are increasingly mainstream - marketers need to experiment and optimize experiences on those platforms. US consumers are projected to spend $40 billion through voice assistants by 2022, a significant rise from the $1.8 billion spent in 2017.

Voice, immersive and mobile should be seen as another channel in the omni-channel experience, either via a dedicated device (e.g. Alexa) or when these interaction points merge onto a single physical smartphone.

Alix de Sagazan, CEO, AB Tasty

It’s going to be a new channel, but CRO can be adapted on any and every channel. Optimization is not a practice; it’s a culture that can be addressed whatever the platform/channel may be.

5. PREPARING FOR CRO 2020

As digital marketing, with all its components, and the customer, with all their habits and behaviours evolve continuously, what are the big CRO strategies or trends our experts think marketers should prioritize as we turn into the next decade?

Nick So, Director of Strategy, WiderFunnel

Instead of viewing CRO as 'just for websites', marketers will need to take a user-first perspective and build experiences that delight at every touch point.

In the next 10 years, we will see widespread adoption of experimentation across all touch points to validate all marketing activity and focus our limited time and resources on the high-impact areas.

Carl Tsukahara, CMO, Optimizely

The shift from physical to digital and back again. Even digital first powerhouses like Amazon are moving back to the physical world. Understanding how order-ahead and omni-channel flow across these types of experiences will be fascinating to watch.

Another trend that will be interesting to watch is the role AR and VR will play in CRO, and in consumer marketing in general.

Alix de Sagazan, CEO, AB Tasty

Personalization will be increasingly effective. What better way to make an impression on users than by tailoring every message you show them!

The new generation of CRO tools on the market will lead to global automation of CRO: the solution will show marketers what the best message is and on which channel – and will automatically deliver the best and more tailored experience!

In an exclusive feature for MarTech Advisor, Hannah Stewart, Head of Marketing at Yieldify said that the bad news is that there's no magic bullet for CRO challenges. While technology is one part of the solution, it seems a clear understanding of the buyers’ journey, clarity on the high impact channels and platforms to prioritize, the right tool, and an intelligent experimentation mindset are key to getting CRO to deliver going into 2020, irrespective of the platform.

About our experts

Nick So, Director of Strategy, WiderFunnel, is an expert on customer experience and organizational experimentation culture and has spoken at several conferences, including eduWeb and eCommerce Summit Dallas.

Carl Tsukahara, is Chief Marketing Officer at Optimizely and is responsible for all global marketing strategy and execution. A 25+ year veteran of Silicon Valley, Carl Tsukahara was most recently Chief Marketing Officer for Birst, a category leader in delivering enterprise business analytics to major global corporations.

de Sagazan, CEO, AB Tasty, champions a data-driven approach to innovative conversion rate optimization solutions, for their more than 600 enterprise clients.

Interested in CRO and UX? Explore more features and insights on our UX&CRO section